Are you an owner of a small scale or a medium sized restaurant business and willing to market your brand for better sales? Think of the digital wave carrying the tech world by the storm! Get a food ordering app integrated and move your business digital.
Though getting a customized restaurant application for your restaurant business isn’t a piece of cake, here’s a guide to get you through the requirements, challenges, and budget involved in developing a food ordering application for your restaurant.
Why you need a dedicated restaurant app for your business?
A customized restaurant app can fetch several benefits to your business, listed below are the major ones:-
Increased sales
According to the stats provided by AppInstitute, right after 12 months of the app adoption by a restaurant business, average spend per customer is increased by 51%. While the average orders increased by 105% per customer, per month over the similar tenure.
Even the business owners tend to follow the strategy of “spend less than you earn” which isn’t a selfish verdict though! It is true that you should be implementing the changes which have a higher probability of boosting your revenues, and an app is exactly what you require.
Retargeting
Retargeting can be the best way out to remind your brand’s existence to your targeted customers. How, you ask? It’s simply the push notifications! With the help of push notifications, you can update the customers with trending dishes, lucrative offers and what’s special for them (loyalty benefits).
While this can only be done with apps, websites aren’t too handy in this case. However not every day you may have offers, there is still an option to flash notifications of the tempting dishes either in general or customer choice (from past purchases) specific.
Brand awareness
Brand awareness is imperative in keeping the business running successfully. However, the crux isn’t getting a wide customer base, it’s more about having loyal customers. A restaurant’s success depends on the loyal customers who tend to at least keep repeating the orders, maintaining an order flow!
It is more profitable to have a decent customer base who generate regular orders than acquiring new ones which involve heavy costing! A professionally designed restaurant app is handy and can be quite a customized option for your loyal customer base.
Essential features a customized restaurant app should include
Your restaurant app should be a feature packed platform, lucrative enough to grab the eyeballs, further boosting sales and elevating profits.
- Restaurant info
Right after the splash screen, your restaurant app should be displaying an information-centric screen which should be containing everything about the restaurant to be visible in a single glance. The information on the first screen should include-
- Brief restaurant description
- Location
- Working hours
- Selected images
- Meal options available
2. Menu & Categories
A fresh page should display the menu options your restaurant is offering along with the categories filter enabling option. The categories can differentiate in case your restaurant is multi-cuisine or if you wish to keep the food divided into subcategories like starters, main course etc.
3. Specific filters
Considering the convenience of e-commerce, online shopping applications, even your food app needs a revamp! Have an option for specific filters including price, category, and availability. It can be along the searching bar available on the screen.
4. Table booking & food delivery
It is one of the most important features, unlike the takeaway outlets available almost at every city location, not every restaurant can be in the closest vicinity but, the best dish of a restaurant can be on the customer’s pick of the day list. Give your customer the convenience of ordering food through your app and book their space when they wish to dine in.
5. Customer profiles & reviews page
People actually rely on positive reviews! More than 60% of food lovers who wish to dine in rely on past customer experience, create a review section for customer feedbacks not just to allow customers to check previous reviews but also to send genuine feedbacks for the restaurants either as a token of appreciation or a service modification reminder.
Similarly, a customer profile is mandatory while every customer should be having an account on the platform, this gives a feeling of connectivity and worth. Thus, making it more interactive.
What team do you require?
An app development requires an efficient team to work and turn the blueprints to the product you’ve thought of developing.
Product manager
As you would always be needing a person accountable for everything going on in the development, a product manager is the one who knows every inch about your product idea, the team working on it and the latest ongoing in the process. Getting you covered against miscommunications, holdbacks and taking care of various disciplines including user experience, long-term planning, customer service, and product marketing strategies.
Developer
The entire technical architecture of the app depends on the developer. Apart from the basic function of writing app’s code, the developer integrates the code with external data sources. Consider the developer to be the most critical team member contributing maximum efforts on the iOS or android app development.
Designer
The designer is responsible for crafting the app’s UI. While a designer will stay imperative even when the app is fully developed and needs further branding and promotion. An innovative designer can elevate the app UI to the next level by making the app interactive for the users.
Recommended skills your restaurant app should include
An app development doesn’t always require just creation but, it needs the perks to jack up-
- UI design skills
- Backend software integration
- Server & infrastructure setup
When you’re sure on beginning the app developments, do not forget to have an NDA in place to protect the ownership and confidentiality.
What attracts customers the most?
Not every app is that successful! It requires the on-point approach to develop a great customer base. Evaluate what will engage more customers to your app:-
1. Relevancy
Your app may be great with UI & UX but, may fail to attract customers. The reason is relevancy! The idea on which your app is based should be relevant enough to grab a customer base it should solve a purpose of convenience and provide reasons why customers should make use of your app.
2. Designing
A talented designer isn’t enough, it’s the logic which is paid! The app designing should be clean, simple and catchy. The elements to be included should be well thought and equally well executed, make the app architecture easy to understand and the features and functions relevant to customer needs.
3. Connectivity
An app is better driven when it’s more connected to the social connections and other app connectivity for data syncing and enhanced usability. This allows users to explore the vast internet and mobile network.
Budgeting recommendations for developing a restaurant app
Restaurant app development can levy higher costs, while the pricing somehow depends on the stage your idea is, for instance, if you’ve already developed a wireframe, you need not seek for a package which needs working from scratch.
You can choose from options available in terms of budgeting:-
1. Hourly Basis
If you’ve just reached halfway in developing a blueprint for your project, it’s better to opt for hourly basis development. The good part here is that you can monitor your project developments step by step, provide feedback on the same and run your later phases planning parallel to the ongoing development. While in this case, you have an added advantage of getting your development started instantly! This may end up being a more costly option but, will be a suitable one to help you develop your product on an experimental basis, provide feedback and keep on improving continuously.
2. Fixed Price
Well prepared with your project idea? Keep a detailed functional specification draft ready to share with the company offering fixed price plans for your project idea. Remember, more you alter your specifications, the better estimate you will be getting, probably more exact in simple words!
3. Dedicated Teams
This is a unique combination of an hourly model and a personalized team to work dedicatedly on your project requirement. You can hire a complete team of required resources for a particular duration of time, for instance, 4-6 months and end up the contract once the development is completed.
App development flow for delivering the apt. mobile application
All set for your app? follow the checkpoints in your restaurant app development journey:-
- Set a goal
- Sketch your ideas
- Wireframe
- Define backend
- Check the model
- Get building
- Look designing
- App testing
- Modifications and adjustments
- Beta testing
- Release the application
Choose the best suited and get going with your million dollar idea!
Conclusion
You can design your own personalized restaurant app by following this ultimate guide to restaurant app development. You don’t have to be a professional designer or content manager to do, you can outsource the app development process.
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You have shared such a useful Information with us of which many people (including myself before this moment) would not be aware. Not many people know how to build a customized or personalized restaurant app or neither do they know the processes for employing experts to execute the task.
Thank you for sharing with us. 🙂
Hey Steffan,
You are most welcome here. Glad you found this article helpful for your need.
Thank you for sharing this
mobile applications are very impotent part of our daily life. we can do everything by mobile applications in easy way less time to take any kind of work..